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Happy 125th birthday!

“The most visited monument that you have to pay for in the world” celebrated its 125th birthday on March 31. It took 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days to construct the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. It is named after Gustave Eiffel (image below), the person who helped build the tower. It is 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, and it was the tallest man-made structure in the world for 41 years. The Chrysler Building in New York, USA stole the title in 1930. The Eiffel Tower receives almost 7,000,000 visitors a year. That is greater than the population of some countries such as New Zealand and Norway.

Initially, many Parisians were unhappy with the Eiffel Tower, since they thought it ruined the beauty of their city. There is also a story of a French writer, Guy de Maupassant, who regularly ate at a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. When asked why, he said that it was the one place in Paris from where he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower! The Tower was also used in the early 1900s to transmit military radio signals.